GCxN Raw Material Ready for Greater Economy and Versatility | News

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Biotech entrepreneur and Hexas Biomass founder and CEO Wendy Owens brought her pioneering (pun intended) achievements to the Shell GameChanger Accelerator Powered by NREL (GCxN) program after admiring it from afar for several years.

“It was just a goal for me,” Owens said. “I was trying to get us to a point in the technology where we could qualify, and it just so happened to be the right fit from last year. The prestige of the program and the opportunity to continue working with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory were key.”

Hexas has already collaborated with NREL on a previous grant, and the GCxN program offers early-stage companies the resources and expertise available at NREL, as well as support from Shell, to accelerate the introduction of new technologies to market.

“We produce a plant-based feedstock called XanoFiber that can be used as a feedstock instead of wood, food crops for fuel and fossil fuel-based feedstocks,” Owens said.

XanoGrass is the source of XanoFiber. XanoGrass is a sterile plant grown from tall grass that has characteristics of corn and bamboo. It is a perennial, meaning that even if you mow it down, it will grow back.

“We can grow where it’s snowy and cold, and we can grow in extremely hot climates,” Owens said. “I don’t just want to replace food crops, but I want to replace some of the 15 billion trees that are cut down every year.”

Hexas is installing a 200-acre facility in Hawaii and has additional pilot plants in Europe, Arkansas, California and Washington state.

“Typically, we get a potential feedstock that’s a waste product from other processes, and we have to figure out how to use it,” said NREL scientist Nancy Dowe. “Now we’re getting into the early stages of developing a purpose-grown energy crop, giving Hexas valuable insights into conversion strategies. It’s a crop that can be grown anywhere, which is very exciting.”

To grow XanoGrass Hexas does not require any special planting and mowing equipment, ordinary tractors and other agricultural equipment are enough.

“We’re bringing a long-term, viable source of income and energy to rural communities,” Owens said. “We want to create not just jobs, but careers. In a place like Hawaii, where energy costs are high, using locally produced bioenergy feedstocks can help people there avoid spending a third of their monthly paycheck on energy.”

To help with proof of concept, Dowe and NREL senior researcher Xiaowen Chen are continuing to test XanoFiber to learn more about it and explore different applications. The most important role it could play is as a replacement for corn stover in biofuel production. Corn stover, which is made from what’s left of a corn plant after it’s harvested, costs about $86 a ton. Because of how efficiently it can be grown, XanoGrass could be 20% cheaper.

“If you can get the cost of the feedstock down, you’re moving in the right direction,” Dowe said. “XanoFiber is even cheaper than we’re projecting in our technoeconomics for corn stover. In our models, we’re looking to get below $80 a ton, down to $70 to $75. If you can get that price down significantly, maybe half, by using a different feedstock, then you’re really impacting the economics of the process.”

Corn straw is often processed into ethanol as a precursor fuel for producing sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). Chen and Dowe hope that XanoFiber can replace corn straw in SAF and also be used to produce biolubricants.

“All SAF producers or fuel manufacturers are looking for low-carbon feedstocks,” Chen said. “Corn straw is seasonal and needs to be stored, which can degrade over time. This increases its cost and carbon intensity. With an alternative feedstock like XanoGrass, it can be harvested at any time.”

Hexas can grow XanoGrass where farmers can’t grow food, on so-called marginal lands, or land that’s been used up and is now typically uncultivable. In a place like Hawaii, that means largely abandoned sugarcane fields.

“Sugarcane is incredibly damaging to the soil because it sucks up nutrients,” Owens said. “It’s hard to grow other crops in the soil once the sugarcane has been produced there, but XanoGrass is resilient and forms symbiotic relationships with soil bacteria and fungi and can grow in most environments.”

Learn more about the GCxN program.